60 Years of Scientific Excellence

When the Cancer Research Institute was founded in 1953, we knew then that immune-based treatments would transform cancer medicine. In more than six decades since, we've made numerous groundbreaking discoveries that have given more patients new hope today.

CRI’s James Allison Wins Canada Gairdner Award

CRI Scientific Advisory Council director James P. Allison, Ph.D., is a recipient of the 2014 Canada Gairdner Award. Canada’s only international scientific prize, the prestigious Gairdner Award is given annually to scientists who have made original—often revolutionary—contributions to medicine. Each award is valued at $100,000 CDN.

Dr. Allison is being recognized for his work leading to the creation of the first checkpoint blockade antibody, ipilimumab, which was approved by the FDA in 2011 for the treatment of metastatic melanoma, and which is now being tested in other cancers including lung and renal cancer. Ipilimumab is a monoclonal antibody that blocks a molecule on T cells called CTLA-4, which serves as the T cell’s brake system. By “taking the brakes off” the immune response, ipilimumab enables a more powerful anti-cancer response.

Dr. Allison has been working on T cell biology for more than 30 years. In the early 1980s, as a young investigator at The University of Texas, Allison was the first to identify the T cell receptor—the protein on the cell surface that binds to antigen and functions as a T cell's ignition switch. A few years later, in 1992, while a professor at UC-Berkeley, he showed that a molecule called CD28 functions as the T cell's gas pedal. Then, in 1995, when no one else was even thinking there would be such a thing, he identified the T cell's brakes, in the process opening up a whole new vista in cancer treatment.